The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of information transfer relates to the delivery of services to a user of a mobile terminal. The services may be in the form of a particular media or communication application desired by the user, such as a music player, a game player, an electronic book, short messages, email, content sharing, etc. The services may also be in the form of interactive applications in which the user may respond to a network device in order to perform a task or achieve a goal. The services may be provided from a network server or other network device, or even from the mobile terminal such as, for example, a mobile telephone, a mobile television, a mobile gaming system, etc.
In some situations, mobile terminals may enhance the interaction that users have with their environment. Numerous use cases have developed around the concept of utilizing mobile terminals to enhance user interaction with their local area such as, for example, virtual tour guides and other mixed reality applications. Mixed reality involves the merging of real and virtual worlds. In some cases, mixed reality involves mixing real world image data with virtual objects in order to produce environments and visualizations in which physical and digital objects co-exist and potentially also interact in real time. Mixed reality includes augmented reality, which uses digital imagery to augment or add to real world imagery, and virtual reality, which simulates real world environments using computer simulation.
When incorporating augmented reality into a particular application or scenario, a user may be enabled to capture a live image or utilize a captured real world image and then add information to the image. A very common example of augmented reality is experienced frequently when watching a sporting event on television with streaming or otherwise intermittently presented score or other status information being overlaid onto the video of the sporting action itself. In the score or status information example described above, the augmentation has almost no relationship with the imagery it is augmenting. Accordingly, the augmentation can simply appear in a fixed location without any regard to what is going on in the real world imagery. However, when a virtual object is to be used to augment an image in the augmented reality situation, and the virtual object is desired to be correlated to a specific object or location within the image, the specific object or location must be tracked so that the virtual object can be positioned properly. However, this type of tracking can be difficult to maintain in many instances.
Based on the description above, it can be appreciated that mixed reality is complicated enough when practiced on a single device. Thus, employment of mixed reality use cases may be even more complex when some form of collaboration is desired where multiple users share a mixed reality environment. Due to the complexity and the large amounts of bandwidth and processing resources that are typically required to handle such situations, such collaboration may be limited to previously known or prepared environments or to situations where all collaborators are collocated. Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide an alternative mechanism by which to provide a collaborative mixed reality experience to users.